Cordy Sky Review

The
Good

The
Bad

Cordy Sky is a pretty game that’s ruined by poor controls, framerate issues, and a lack of difficulty

Cordy Sky is the spinoff of the 2011 platformer, Cordy. This time around, Cordy crashes his ship on a strange planet while on his way to the mysterious “Planet 2.” While there, he comes across a friendly flying robot, named Volt, who is willing to help him get a new ship. Cordy just needs to climb his way into the planet’s atmosphere and fix it up. In hindsight, maybe he shouldn’t have.

Unfortunately for Cordy, he runs into some roadblocks along the way, and I’m not simply referring to the obstacles he hits as he’s jumping. Compared to the original side-scrolling platformer, Cordy Sky‘s controls are incredibly sluggish, and there’s no option to adjust sensitivity.

There are three different control methods in Cordy Sky: On-screen buttons, tilt, and slide. The on-screen buttons work the same as the original game; buttons for left and right directions are on the bottom-left corner and jump is one the bottom-right. This controls fine, but is far less responsive than the original game. The slide control is a disaster. You move left and right by sliding your finger to either side of the screen, and tapping makes you jump. This is bearable until double-jumping and precision are required. My preferred control of choice is tilt, due to my time with games like Doodle Jump and Abduction! This method felt slightly more responsive than the others, but that’s not really saying much. You need to tilt your device to somewhat of an extreme to move quickly, and this can be troublesome when making difficult maneuvers.

And you’re going to run into plenty of difficult maneuvers. Even if the controls were more responsive, some of the jumps you need to make later on are brutal. Normally, a difficulty spike isn’t a bad thing, but this difficulty spike has a flaw – it’s too forgiving in your response to it’s challenge.

Some of the jumps are tough, but if you miss them, you can easily catch yourself on one of the many devices you just passed. You need to drop very far to fail, and with the amount of clutter you can bounce from, that’s rarely a problem. Those rare times when you are falling to certain death, you can call in Volt to jetpack you straight up for a while. You need to recharge this ability by collecting gears, but there’s no challenge in doing so, as a double-jump causes a suction effect on all nearby gears.

Cordy Sky‘s story mode is short. There are five levels to this story, with the first being the tutorial stage (though you can turn off the tutorial bits if you desire). These levels are pretty short, and you can easily breeze through them all in one sitting. That is, unless you die. Despite this “story mode” being broken into levels, if you fail once, you’re forced to start over from the beginning. This is neither time consuming nor difficult, but it does beg the question of why developer SilverTree Media bothered to divide the game into levels. Perhaps the best reason to play through the story is to complete the achievement list. Coincidentally, scrolling through the achievement list is just as slow and awkward as controlling Cordy.

Infinity mode is likely to be more suited to most players’ likings. Unfortunately, the difficulty progression is about the same as story mode. You’ll be playing a long time before any challenge arises, if it ever does. One of the infinity mode achievements is to reach one million meters. To put it in perspective, one story mode achievement is to reach five thousand meters and complete the final level. The challenge to reach the million mark wears off quickly, and you’ll find yourself bored and moving on to something else long before you get there. Story mode is short, and while infinity will certainly last you longer, the novelty won’t last long.

Cordy Sky isn’t much better technically. Occasionally the framerate drops significantly for a second or two. The game controls slow enough as it is, so this honestly doesn’t affect the gameplay too much, in most cases. Regardless, it’s still not something that should be happening. You do have the option to change the graphics from “high” to “simple,” but it makes little difference.

There’s so much that Cordy Sky nearly did right. For a game this visually attractive, it is a complete disappointment that the controls didn’t live up to the looks. I have to assume that more responsive controls would have turned this game into an enjoyable experience. As it stands, the poor control and lack of difficulty turns this potential time waster into a waste of time. Unless you’re really into the endless jumper style of game, steer clear of this one. And if you still decide to give it a shot, the free download gives you the nice surprise of having to pay a dollar to unlock the full version of the game. Try the demo if you insist, but save your dollar.